Hard work in the kitchen has earned 25 third-semester Napavine Jr./Sr. High School culinary students a special milestone: their own personalized Tiger Chef jackets.
Students across four class periods earned their jackets after progressing through the culinary pathway at the school, according to a writeup provided by Chris Tarabochia.
Each jacket symbolizes the hard work, dedication and growth students have demonstrated throughout the program, Tarabochia wrote.
Proceeds from the Tiger Cafe made the jackets possible, connecting students’ work in the cafe to a meaningful celebration of their achievement.
“Congratulations to our Tiger Chefs!” the school district wrote. “We’re proud of your commitment to the culinary program and look forward to seeing what you create next.”
In April 2025, The Chronicle reported the school’s new commercial kitchen had passed inspection and was ready for students to practice cooking for their teachers and other school staff.
The kitchen started as the high school’s home economics classroom, which the district decided to gut and turn into a commercial kitchen about four years ago as part of an ongoing effort to expand its career and technical education (CTE) programs.
“We have a lot of restaurants in Napavine … So I went to all the managers and said, you know, ‘what do you want students to know?’ And so that’s kind of why we built it how we built it and everything, kind of geared toward training them to go to work,” Napavine School District CTE Director David Rutherford told The Chronicle in 2025.
The district’s culinary arts program consists of three courses: Culinary Arts 1 and Culinary Arts 2 at the high school level and an intro to culinary arts and nutrition class for eighth graders.
“We just learn how to cook, how to use ingredients, tools and all that,” said culinary arts teacher Dalton Workman told The Chronicle last year.
The Napavine School District hoped to build the culinary arts program into an entrepreneur program like the school’s shop and greenhouse that can help students raise enough money to compete in high-level SkillsUSA competitions.
Other CTE programs at Napavine Jr./Sr. High School include business fundamentals, commercial art, construction, digital photography, environmental science, global business communications, graphic design, healthy living and welding.
For more information on Napavine Jr./Sr. High School’s CTE program, visit https://nhs.napavineschools.org/o/nhs/page/napavine-cte.
